


broken hearts (make it rain)

by renaissance



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Bittersweet, Canon Relationship Break Up, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 11:51:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15290919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: An ode to the passage of time, the pervasive presence of hometowns once removed, and working things out the hard way.





	broken hearts (make it rain)

**Author's Note:**

> in 2016 i wrote a fair bit of pynch fic, which i don't regret in the least, but now i'm back two years later having finally shaken the sheen of canon (which let me down many times in its last quarter but let's not talk about that) and accepted with the benefit of hindsight that i preferred adansey all along. actually, i've been trying to finish this fic since last year, and have finally kicked my arse into gear.
> 
> title is from radiohead's "identikit." thank you to aro for help with american geography, and rhys for being enabler-in-chief.
> 
> i'm not going back to writing trc fic full-time but i like the way i write when i'm immersed in this world. it's fun every now and then. this fic is also fun every now and then. a lot of the time it's just sad. i hope you enjoy it anyway.

At eighteen, everything had seemed so set in stone—the future was a canvas waiting to be covered in paint, but everyone was their final self, and all love was true love, a point of emotional finality. At twenty-three, Gansey realised that had not stopped changing at eighteen, and indeed he probably wasn’t done with it at all, nor might he ever be. In the intervening years, everything had torn itself apart and reformed so many times that Gansey had lost count.

“You’re taller,” Adam said.

“Am I?”

“A bit. Or maybe I’ve shrunk.”

Gansey smiled, because Adam seldom did when he made jokes. “All that hard work can’t be healthy for your back. I suspect I’ll shrink too, in good time.”

“Still can’t believe you’re here,” Adam said. “Of all places you could’ve chosen… who would’ve had you…”

There was, as with all things, a story behind that. Gansey hummed. All he said was, “It certainly is good to see you again.”

It had been over a year since they’d last caught up. There was always that same promise—“We’ll catch up soon!”—and then there was always some complication. The obstacles piled up and the time in between stretched thinner. That continental drift, the inevitable tectonics of your early twenties, had pulled them apart.

“How’s things with Blue?” Adam asked, because of course he did.

“Fine,” Gansey said. Oh, he sounded terse now. He sounded like Adam. “I stopped by Henrietta on my way here, caught up with her and everyone at Fox Way.”

“Did they do a reading for you?”

Gansey shook his head. “I declined.”

“Must be awkward,” Adam said. “I could do a reading for you. I mean, must be awkward with Blue, though, spending time with her again after all that stuff about _true love_ —”

“How’re things with Ronan?”

Gansey felt horrid the moment he said it—that wound was still bleeding through its stitches.

“Surely you caught up with him while you were in Henrietta,” Adam said, his voice burning enough to cauterise. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“He did.” After all this time, Gansey still couldn’t lie to Adam. “You know Ronan. He acts like everything is perfectly normal.”

“Well, he would. It is normal for him, being on the farm, taking care of Matthew and Opal. That’s what he’s made for. I’m the one who was—that’s what it was about, you know. Not the distance. We could have survived if it was just the distance. The real arguments were because he wanted to stay in that tiny fucking town surrounded by all those horrible people and I—”

Adam trailed off. Like a long-forgotten reflex, Gansey had reached across both their cups of tea and put his hand over Adam’s.

“Sorry,” Adam said. “I didn’t mean to dump all that on you. It’s just been weird. I suppose you of all people know how it feels.”

“Something like that.”

“I guess I’ll get over it. You know, you give so much of yourself to someone, it’s hard to—is it hard to shake it, at first?”

Gansey had never told anyone the full story of his break-up with Blue. She was the only one who knew because, as it turned out, it had happened much the same for her. Adam was right, though. Every attachment, once severed, is still hanging on by a thread. Even when the attraction is gone, some of the emotion might remain—although Gansey suspected it might be rather the opposite for Adam and Ronan. He hadn’t caught up with Ronan in ages either. Did this mean that Gansey would have to take sides—Adam’s side? He had spent all of high school pretending that he didn’t feel some instinctual pull towards taking Adam’s side in every argument.

Well. “Time can change a lot of things,” Gansey said. That just about summed it up.

 

* * *

 

Adam’s PhD was in physics, and Gansey didn’t think he’d ever met someone who so suited his discipline.

They made a habit of meeting in the coffee shop on campus whenever they could. Gansey felt like a man starved, who had crawled through the desert and finally come to an oasis, and now he didn’t want to leave. Even when Adam talked in a language Gansey didn’t understand in the least, Gansey could listen to the sound of his voice for hours on end.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have asked Adam to explain his PhD in such great detail.

“—because the thing about the space-time tensor is that—you’re not paying attention, are you?”

“Hm?” Gansey was stirring his coffee absently. Those were the first words he’d understood since _galaxy_. “Oh, I’m keeping up just fine. It’s all very interesting.”

“It’s okay,” Adam said, “you can admit you don’t get it. Most days I don’t get it either. I just do the math.”

That was so blatantly a falsehood that Gansey was almost offended, but he knew Adam never lied about his own ability to deliberately undersell himself. Adam genuinely never estimated himself highly enough. Luckily he had Gansey to do that for him again, as had always done.

“I’m listening,” Gansey said. “Keep going.”

Hesitantly, Adam did. “Well, as I was saying, you can formulate the space-time tensor in a number of different ways, depending on the cosmology you want it to describe. So one of the things I’m doing is running simulations that compare those different formulations.”

“See, I understood that,” Gansey said. “You put math into a computer and it tells you what space looks like. So where do the galaxies come into it again?”

“Back to the start,” Adam said, shaking his head, but smiling.

Gansey’s PhD was in history. It couldn’t be in anything else, despite the courses in language and anthropology he’d experimented with as an undergrad. Specifically, it was in early Medieval Welsh history—Gansey had a lot to say on the subject of dead kings. He was, after all, one himself. But history would always be an awkward fit on Gansey; he dived too deep, specialised too intently, to be able to truly appreciate a broader context.

Adam, on the other hand, was a perfect fit for physics. He was a being of immaculate geometry, as uncanny as a simulation and as obscure as the galaxies he studied, whose light reached Earth billions of years before the concept of history had even existed.

Or perhaps Gansey would think Adam was perfect, whatever he did.

Their coffee had long since gone cold by the time Gansey finally understood—at least partially—how the redshifts of galaxies helped inform Adam’s choice of parameters in his simulations. Adam didn’t drink while he talked, and Gansey couldn’t pay attention to two things at once.

“I should probably get back to the office,” Adam said. “I hope my code’s finished running.”

“I imagine I have work to do too,” Gansey mused.

“You arts students are such slackers.”

“Did they teach you that at MIT or in grad school?”

Adam kicked him under the table. “You’re doing a good job of showing me yourself. Have you done any work since you got here?”

“Hey, I’m new. I don’t even have a computer at my desk yet.”

“But knowing you,” Adam said, “you don’t need a computer to get started. You’ll have to tell me about your research sometime.”

Gansey got to his feet, stretching. They really had been there a while. “Oh, you already know the ins and outs of it. My advisor is very interested in my thoughts on Celtic mysticism.”

“She’s in for a shock. Have you told her about… ?”

Adam trailed off, pushing his chair out and standing up as an excuse. They never talked about what had happened to them in Henrietta beyond vagaries. Even in the immediate aftermath, it seemed somehow wrong to let that bit of their past continue to seep into the future.

“You know, I don’t think I will tell her,” Gansey said. “I don’t think she’d believe me.”

Adam laughed. “Yeah. Sometimes I don’t even believe it. Much easier to stick to universal constants.”

“You told me the Hubble constant is actually a parameter.”

“Some things really are constant,” Adam said. “The speed of light in a vacuum. The smallest possible unit of energy.” They stopped outside the coffee shop, and Adam rubbed the back of his neck, smiling self-consciously. “You and me.”

“Oh, that’s a constant now, is it?” Gansey sounded awfully confident for someone whose heart was somersaulting unrepentantly against the cavity of his chest. “We’ve certainly had our fair share of fallings out.”

“Don’t remind me. But we’re here now. I can’t tell you how glad I am to have someone from home around.”

Because Adam didn’t want to be reminded of their arguments, Gansey didn’t remind him of his own affection for Henrietta, and didn’t mention that for all Adam claimed to hate the town, he had called it home, and he was glad it had followed him here. Gansey wondered if Henrietta was really all that had come between Adam and Ronan—somehow, now didn’t feel like the right moment to ask.

“I’m glad to be here with you,” was all he said.

“Let’s get coffee again tomorrow,” Adam said. “Maybe you can tell me more about your thesis.”

“Maybe I’ll have a thesis by then.”

Adam reached out a hand and touched Gansey’s wrist, just lightly. “I think you already have it.”

Gansey wondered just how much he had. This wasn’t flirting—Adam had never flirted in his life—but at some point, Gansey had started wanting it to be flirting. When had that happened? In Henrietta, probably, as with all things. Years ago, before everything.

That was another exceptional skill of time, whether or not it could be codified in an equation and simulated on a computer: Gansey could look into the past and notice things he hadn’t seen at the time. He remembered standing around at the Barns and talking to Adam about love. How Adam had spoken about Ronan, like he wasn’t _sure_. How Gansey had spoken about Blue like he had never been surer of anything. How different that conversation now looked, when Gansey imagined that they might’ve been talking about one another.

 

* * *

 

Adam lived in a studio apartment a few blocks away from the university. There was a couch in the bedroom for no apparent reason other than to double as a second wardrobe, and the dining table was in the kitchen, but it was being used as a desk, covered in writing paper and Adam’s laptop, sitting open with a journal article on the screen.

“Sorry it’s such a dump,” Adam said. “I don’t usually get visitors.”

“I’ll have to visit more often,” Gansey said, teasing, like he didn’t also descend into squalor when there was no-one around to check him.

He was kind of tipsy—there’d been faculty drinks to welcome the new grad students, and the postdocs kept buying rounds, and at some point Gansey must have texted Adam because then Adam had been outside with a jacket and a half-finished bottle of soda and he’d said, “You’re in no fit state to walk all the way home.” And, Gansey did live further than Adam, so he conceded easily.

“Make yourself at home, then.”

Gansey left his things by the door and fell backwards onto the bed. He didn’t even take his shoes off.

“You’re useless,” Adam said, but he sat down beside Gansey anyway. “Tell me if it’s just the drink, but I think you’re getting nostalgic, too.”

“I’m not pining, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not like you.”

“Okay, that’s a low blow.”

Gansey rolled onto his side. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Anyway, I’m not pining,” Adam said. “I’m getting over Ronan. There’s a difference.”

“So you still like him.”

“I spent a good five years of my life with him, of course I still fucking like him. I just hate him, too, and we’re not talking right now.”

That surprised Gansey. “Not at all?”

“Why,” Adam said, “it wasn’t like that with you and Blue?”

Silence.

At last Adam said, “What _was_ it like?”

“It started ending so soon after it had begun,” Gansey said. He sat up and shuffled back so he was sitting against the headboard.

Adam stayed where he was. “Go on.”

Gansey knew why Adam was doing this when he was drunk. Because the break-up was three years ago—no, longer now—and Gansey had still not confided the full story in Adam. Nor to anyone, not that Adam would have any way of knowing that. Adam also had no way of knowing that once he’d told Gansey to go on, Gansey would not stop.

“We had just been to Bushkill Falls, and we were camping overnight nearby. We’d been through a bottleshop in the last town we’d stopped at but we were running low on supplies by then—that, and we couldn’t afford to be too choosy. We were banking on Henry’s fake ID, but neither Blue nor I had anything of our own, and they caught us out. We had only put half our haul into bags before we had to dash, so we were left with the worst: a lot of cruisers, a six-pack of some truly awful beer, and a bottle of mixed bourbon. By Bushkill, we only had the bourbon left, but lucky we were all cheap drunks back then.

“You could hear the waterfall from where we were camped. It was a beautiful night; I remember the atmosphere better than my own actions. Blue had to tell me about it the next morning. Henry and I—we kissed. Or, I kissed him, I think. It wasn’t anything more than that, and Henry told me that Blue had laughed about it. She wasn’t annoyed at all.”

“Did it happen again, on the road trip?”

Gansey nodded. “It happened with all of us. Blue got over it. Blue and Henry—that was inevitable, too. And all three of us, at one point. At more than one point. When we got back to reality, we tried to pretend everything was normal, but Henry and I were enrolling in college and Blue was staying in Henrietta and—well, there you go, it’s Henrietta again.”

“Everything comes back to Henrietta,” Adam said. “Do you think that’s why we’ve both ended up in DC?”

“I guess it might be,” Gansey said.

Adam shuffled closer to Gansey. He didn’t bother to hide his curiosity. “So what happened once you were apart? Was that it?”

“We talked about having an open relationship. I slept with Henry once or twice more, but other than that nothing changed. That was just it—nothing changed. And then we saw each other again when I went back to Henrietta in the holidays and we had a long talk and—we had discovered some things about ourselves, in our time apart.”

“Like what? You’re useless at relationships?” Adam poked an accusing finger into Gansey’s chest. “I dated Blue too, remember.”

“And now she has a girlfriend,” Gansey said. “Blue and I weren’t drawn to each other because we were in love. We were drawn to each other because neither of us ever really fit in the boxes we were supposed to. The real—the final reason we broke up—it’s that we’re both gay.”

“Okay,” Adam said.

“That doesn’t—well I mean it know it won’t bother you, not the way it’ll bother my parents if I ever get around to telling them, but—”

“I’m going to kiss you now, if that’s okay,” Adam said. He frowned. “Unless you’re too drunk.”

“No, I’m—it’s fine. Kiss me.”

So Adam kissed him.

It didn’t last long, but it carried its own weight, in the brush of Adam’s thumb against Gansey’s cheek, the sticky dryness to his lips from the soda, the sweep of the tip of his statuesque nose. It was a world apart from every terrible drunk kiss Gansey had ever had. It was the long sleep and clear morning that sobered him up after a night drinking. He wanted to do it again.

“Can we—” Gansey began, but stopped, because Adam had folded in on himself like a flower at night, his lips twisting into a grimace. Still beautiful, even when he wasn’t using them to kiss Gansey, even when he was scowling. “I don’t want you to be my rebound.”

Gansey could well have stopped listening after, “I don’t want you.”

“Sorry,” Adam said. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. Let’s—not talk about it, okay?”

They didn’t talk about it. Gansey took his shoes off and put his head down on Adam’s pillow and fell asleep almost right away.

 

* * *

  
They didn’t talk about it, which was fine, for a time. They kept meeting for coffee as normal, complaining about their research, laughing about the tv shows they’d been watching. It wasn’t even a forced normality. It was like that night never happened, and for a while, Gansey thought that would be fine. They were friends as they’d always been.

As with most problems of the sleeping dog variety, avoiding it was a fine way of dealing with it, until suddenly it wasn’t.

“Still up for the film?” Adam asked. He slipped a few quarters into the tip jar as they left the cafe, glancing at his wristwatch as he let go of the coins. “We might be a little late.”

The quiet implication: that they had spent too long talking.

“Let’s skip it, then,” Gansey said.

“Wise choice. Why don’t you come over and we can watch one of mine?”

“You have movies?”

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m as cultured as anyone.”

Gansey felt bad for it, even though they both clearly knew it had been a joke. Adam was watching movies at home. Only a few years, and you don’t know someone at all.

Adam kept his DVDs in the kitchen pantry. There were only about fifteen of them. They sat next to a half-filled spice rack and a bag of sesame seeds that had sprung a leak. Gansey had left his glasses on the coffee table (three adjacent stacks of impossibly heavy second-hand textbooks) and he couldn’t read any of the titles.

“What do you want,” Adam said, “comedy, action?”

Romance, Gansey did not say, because apart from being beyond corny, that would be embarrassing, and there was a weird twitch at the back of his mind that wouldn’t let him embarrass himself in front of Adam, no matter that Adam had seen him to his worst and back.

“You pick,” he said instead.

“ _Withnail and I_?”

“Depressing.”

“Perfect.”

How like Adam it was, to suggest with a smile on his face that they watch a film that would leave them quietly existential. There was such beauty in that smile, the faintest hint that Adam was torturing himself as well as Gansey, and that he knew neither of them would object to it. They were always a torturous pair.

Adam set up his laptop on the coffee table—Gansey moved his glasses—and sat to Gansey’s left, far enough away that it wasn’t intimate. The couch had been mysteriously cleared of clothes since the last time Gansey was there. Adam leant forward to press play.

Gansey had seen the film before, years ago. There hadn’t been a moment when he’d realised, not exactly, but if there had, this might have been it. So halfway through he couldn’t help but say, “This would all be so much easier if they admitted they fancied each other.”

“ _Fancied_.”

“They’re British. It’s what they’d say.”

“Either way, that’s not the point,” Adam said. “The point is that it’s so present but they never, ever acknowledge it. And to what end? They’re miserable, but they never let it overcomplicate their lives.”

“Maybe life is meant to be complicated,” Gansey said.

They were sitting at opposite ends of the couch, and Gansey leant back against the armrest. He knew it was a load of wank, that life had to be hard or it wasn’t worth living, or whatever. But Gansey was a consummate wanker—Ronan had told him this, if kindly—pretentious and privileged, and however much he grew out of it he would always need some outlet for platitudes like this. Adam would understand.

Adam looked away. “Maybe it would only make them more miserable.”

“I’d take the risk,” Gansey said. _Take the hint_.

Fingers twitching over the remote, Adam seemed to debate with himself. Gansey crossed the gulf between them and took the remote right from beneath Adam’s hand, paused the movie, and kissed Adam before he could second-guess himself.

“Okay,” Adam said. “Yeah. What if they just—”

Gansey kissed him again. It was hard not to. “We’ll write our own ending for the film.”

“Nerd.”

They became entangled on the couch; Adam was a creature of pointy ends, his long limbs taking up too much space and none at all, his fingers gripping onto Gansey’s shoulders like otherwise he’d fall. Somewhere in the haze of it all Gansey’s glasses ended up on the wooden floor, half beneath the couch. He couldn’t keep his hands still, wanted to map every inch of this like the expert cartographer he’d once been. Adam had been so vehement about leaving Henrietta, but Gansey couldn’t help compare them. The miniature Henrietta at Monmouth, hidden corners and a fine layer of dust ready for Gansey’s fingerprints to track through them, and Adam, an old photograph unearthed from a box of keepsakes, too precious to smudge.

This, at least, Gansey recognised as an unhealthy impulse. He was in the strange and beautiful position that he could touch Adam Parrish however much he wanted, for however long this lasted—and maybe he’d wanted it for years, even before he strictly knew what _want_ meant.

“We should stop,” Adam said. “No, sorry, no, we shouldn’t. I just—don’t want—”

“I’m not your rebound,” Gansey said. “If that’s what you’re talking about?”

Adam stilled. “You remember that? I thought you were drunk.”

“Not drunk enough to forget.”

“This isn’t—ugh. We’ll talk about it later.”

And maybe it really would be that easy.

 

* * *

 

“Blue,” Gansey said. “Blue, Blue, Blue. You could give me advice.”

“Yes,” Blue said, “but you’d never listen.”

Gansey put one hand to his chest, even though the effect would be lost on the other end of the phone call. “I always listen to your advice.”

“True love is metaphorical,” Blue said robotically. “The contentment you’re looking for will only come when you find contentment in yourself. Is that the kind of advice you’re looking for?”

“Too vague. Do you think you can give me something more specific?”

Blue hummed. Gansey could hear her moving around on the other end, walking with her mobile tucked between her ear and her shoulder, clattering around the house. “You once told me that you loved me because I made you feel quiet,” she said. “If you’re not sure whether or not you’ve found that quiet… maybe you haven’t tried to listen for it yet.”

“I didn’t tell you I wanted romantic advice,” Gansey pointed out.

“I’m psychic. I know these things. So who is he?”

“I wonder.”

Blue didn’t say anything; she always knew when he wasn’t done, and gave him pause to collect his thoughts, ready himself to continue.

Gansey changed tactics. “Remember when you dated Adam? It’s like that. It’s—I don’t know if it’s serious. Everything about it feels messy, raw.”

“Adam didn’t make me quiet,” Blue said. “That’s why it was doomed to fail, I guess.”

Adam didn’t make Gansey quiet either—every time they were together it was like a cacophony of shouting voices in Gansey’s head, an onslaught of messages mixed or otherwise. Gansey didn’t hate it. He knew that Adam was not a quiet person; there was too much to him for him to ever remain silent. Even when his mouth was shut and his eyes closed, he was so, so present. Gansey wouldn’t want Adam to make him quiet.

“I suppose I’m doubting my own thesis,” Gansey said. “Don’t you ever—don’t you ever want to shout?”

“Ah, that’s the difference between us, Gansey. I’m always shouting. Maybe you’re right, you need someone who’ll encourage you to let it all out.”

That. That sounded nice.

“Thanks, Blue.”

“Any time.”

She hung up first—it wasn’t as sacrosanct as their phone calls had once been—and Gansey wasted no time in dialling Adam’s number. He dialled it, backspaced. No matter how much he wanted to shout, how long he’d wanted Adam, this was something he couldn’t rush. Adam-and-Ronan were too recent a memory. Gansey would not be the rebound.

 

* * *

 

Gansey was not the rebound. But neither did they move slowly.

It was one of those little inevitabilities—a universal constant, perhaps—that the kiss was just the beginning. Gansey was learning that there were many sides to Adam Parrish. There was the Adam who kissed Gansey behind the coffee shop, when they both should’ve been in their offices, hard at work. There was the Adam who texted Gansey, _sorry cant tonight busy coding_ , when they probably should’ve been kissing. There was the Adam who hung around Gansey’s flat and let him cook dinner but kept prudishly away from Gansey’s bedroom, and now there was the Adam who said, “Come back to mine,” and had Gansey in bed a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it minute later.

This was all very new and exciting, until Adam said, “Ronan.”

Gansey’s first instinct was to grit his teeth and pretend it never happened. His second instinct was that that would be stupid. So he corrected Adam: “Gansey.”

“Shit,” Adam said. “Fuck. Reflexes. Shit.”

“We don’t have to if you don’t—”

“No, I want to.” Gansey trusted that Adam wouldn’t say that unless he meant it. “I just—fuck. Sorry.”

They were at Adam’s place, in Adam’s bed. Had Adam and Ronan slept together here, when Ronan had visited? Before they’d broken up? Gansey shouldn’t have been thinking about that, but he was, and for his sins Adam had said Ronan’s name while they were screwing around, while Gansey’s eyes were closed.

It was an easy mistake to make, Gansey supposed. He wondered if he and Adam could go much further than this, or if Ronan would always be there, a silent partner.

“It’s fine. It was—recent.”

“You’re not my rebound,” Adam said. It sounded like he was reassuring himself. “Gansey.”

“Yes?”

“Gansey,” Adam said again. “It’s not like it’s—hard to say. Gansey. Richard Campbell Gansey the third. _Dick_.”

“Please don’t call me Dick,” Gansey said; he ruined the effect by laughing.

“Okay, Dick,” Adam said. He said it in such a way that Gansey knew he was dead serious about it.

“Any louder and your neighbours are going to hear. What’ll they think? Sweet, innocent Adam Parrish—”

“Oh, shut up.”

“—shouting out, _Dick, Dick_!”

Adam kissed Gansey breathless and pulled away, smirking. “You want me to start banging on the walls too? I can be a nuisance if I like.”

“I don’t want you to be a nuisance. I want to kiss you again.”

For a moment it seemed like Adam would do it, but then he shook his head, and pushed Gansey off him. “No, we can’t—we need to talk about this. I feel like I’m being too reckless.”

“How so?” Gansey asked. He had a sinking feeling he already knew.

“What if I’m just using you?” Adam said, so quietly that the neighbours wouldn’t have heard even if they’d been listening in with military-grade technology. It had started raining outside, drops hitting the window like marbles on a tiled floor. Louder now, Adam said, “I don’t want that.”

“You’re not,” Gansey said.

“You don’t know that.”

Adam stood up. He was half-naked and a real picture. He started pacing around what little space there was between the bed, the coffee table, and the couch, which was now covered in clothes again.

Gansey sat up and, despite himself, pulled his pants back on. “Don’t do this. Come on, Adam. We can work this one out.”

“You like it too,” Adam said. “ _Henrietta_.” That, he spat. “It’ll just end the same way. You’ll want to go back and I’ll want to stay here or move farther afield, try to escape again. And I’ll keep getting pulled back, because so long as all the people I love still love it there, I’m fucking stuck, aren’t I?”

“You still love Ronan,” Gansey said. Adam could write it off as a reflex all he liked, but there it was. Plain as day.

“No,” Adam said. His eyes went wide like a deer in headlights. “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t—Gansey, don’t—”

But Gansey was already getting up, putting on his shirt and jacket, socks and shoes, getting read to leave. Doing this to Adam was one thing, keeping him company and more and navigating him through this turbulence. Gansey couldn’t do this to himself. He couldn’t because he knew he would, and he had to stop it before it started. Well, it had already started—before it went any further.

God, it was raining. Gansey left the apartment and he knew Adam was following him and he knew neither of them had an umbrella. This was all too much. Gansey’s head was spinning, a cacophony of sounds in his head like ten orchestras, all of them tuning. That’s something else he was getting used to feeling about Adam. All this _noise_. They would always be like this—clashing. And Adam still—

“Gansey, you absolute fucking idiot,” Adam said. He was standing on the front steps to the apartment block, just out of the rain, wearing only a cardigan over his shirt and wrapping his arms around his chest to keep warm. “Listen to what I mean, not what I’m saying.”

Duly, Gansey stopped. He was already drenched. “That’s a big ask of someone who isn’t psychic.”

Adam glowered at him. “Okay, well, I’ll say it. At various points in my life, I have been in—in _love_ —with lots of people. I thought I was in love with Blue for a bit. I was definitely in love with Ronan for a couple of years. And I’m in love with you right now, and I probably have been since we met. And I don’t think—I don’t think it’s fair to say there’s only one kind of love, or that a different kind doesn’t still linger when one kind’s gone.”

“So it wasn’t just Henrietta,” Gansey said, rather than taking in what Adam had just said about him, which was a little much for his rain-sodden brain just now.

“It’s always Henrietta,” Adam said. He sighed. “We fell out of love. It happens.”

“I never thought it would happen with you and Ronan.” This felt like an admission. This felt like it might have been holding Gansey back this entire time, that he had been so focused on Adam-and-Ronan-and-Henrietta that he had forgotten about Adam, who was right in front of him.

“Did you hope?”

“Don’t make me answer that,” Gansey said.

“Well I need to know if you feel the same way,” Adam snapped, “because otherwise I’m going to lock you out in the cold.”

“You know, I got three offers for grad school,” Gansey said. “I’m not saying that to show off. I’m telling you because I got three offers and none of them were where you are, so I pushed for DC, and in the end they found the funds to get me a desk and an advisor.”

“Oh.” Adam’s arms went slack. “That’s—”

“So are you going to let me back in?”

“You were the one who stormed off before I got the chance to explain myself,” Adam said, but he was smiling.

Gansey knew this was it. This was the agreement they had been trying to reach, and it had taken an argument to reach it, which was typical Adam and Gansey. Adam-and-Gansey. Oh, that sounded nice.

“Well?” Adam said. “Don’t make me come out there and get you, Dick.”

“You’re really going to start calling me that?”

Adam tilted his chin upwards, mock-pensive. “I’ll give it a trial period.”

“Now I’m really not budging,” Gansey said, and he spread his arms out wide. Like he’d pre-arranged it with nature, a gust of wind blew past and the rain picked up, splashing Adam in his sheltered hideaway. “Come on.”

“Oh, fine.”

Adam put his arms out to meet Gansey’s and stepped forward.

 

* * *

 

The sun was setting on the National Mall, and fall was turning to winter, dry grass under cloud-spotted skies. Gansey’s feet were sore from an afternoon in the Air and Space Museum—he had been there before, of course, when he was a kid, and he’d seen all the attractions. It was different with Adam, Adam with his degree in physics and his encyclopedic knowledge of the real science they didn’t tell you on the wall plaques beside the memorabilia, facts and figures he whispered in Gansey’s ear so the rest of the museum-goers didn’t think he was being a killjoy, even though they both knew he was.

They found dinner at food trucks and sat on a bench to eat it, shoulders just touching. “So,” Gansey said, “was this a date?”

“Maybe you should have worked that one out when I said, Come to the museum with me,” Adam said. He might have been more impressively deadpan if his mouth wasn’t full of souvlaki.

“I’m not the one who can read minds,” Gansey pointed out.

“I can’t read minds.” Adam sounded scandalised. “I can only—okay, semantics. Yes. It was a date.”

Gansey shrugged. “Semantics.”

“Don’t be like that,” Adam said, and gave him a sharp elbow to the ribs.

“Can I ask another semantic question, then?”

Adam shook his head. He put his food down on his lap, which meant he was getting ready to go off. “No, I’m going to guess. You’ve spent all afternoon letting me take the lead and now you spring on me, was this a date? I don’t know, Dick, was it? You told me you like it when I talk about things you’ll never understand, but I think you could understand a bit of physics if you spent an afternoon with one of my high school textbooks. So what you’re going to ask me now is if we’re going out. If this means we’re a couple. Did I get it right?”

“Almost.”

“Well tell me,” Adam said.

Gansey asked him instead. “Will you go out with me?”

Adam was silent.

“We don’t have to tell anyone,” Gansey said. “Not yet. Not for as long as you want. And when we do, we don’t have to go back to Henrietta to do it. Hell, we can spend winter in DC. We can spend winter in California, if you want.”

“That sounds nice.” Adam went bright red. “Um, that’s a yes, by the way.”

Gansey liked nothing better than seeing Adam blush, with the exception of Adam himself. “I gathered.”

Adam bumped his knee against Gansey’s. “I want to tell everyone. Eventually. I just think we should have something more to talk about than one museum date and the. You know.”

“We’ve got time.”

“So much time. What do you want to do next?”

“You could come back to mine,” Gansey suggested.

“Yeah,” Adam said, an uncautious smile blooming on his face. “That sounds good.”

Gansey could hear his heart beating and the birds chirping and every tourist language spoken by every pair of feet that walked past the bench. Adam made him so loud. It was exceptional. There was no prophecy to be fulfilled—Gansey could take this noise and amplify it in whichever direction he chose.

**Author's Note:**

> science, _withnail and i_ , and a rain scene. this is so indulgent. please leave a comment if you enjoyed it to let me know that i'm not just writing for an audience of one, haha


End file.
